Music

Top 5 Punk Releases: October

by Sam Sutherland

Each month, tons of new music from many taste-spanning genres is released into a fast-consuming, unforgiving market; it can be tough to get a handle on what’s new before it’s on to the next. In an attempt to highlight the standout releases, at the end of each month, AUX staff re-cap the month in Punk, Metal, Indie/Pop/Rock, Hip Hop, and Pop with the top five releases in each. Consider it your cheat sheet for year-end lists.

Top 5 Punk Releases:
October

 

La Dispute – Wildlife
	La Dispute are part of a genuinely exciting reclamation of the long shat-upon tag of “screamo,” stealing its power from goofy-haired tweens and reminding kids that Level Plane will always be way, way cooler than Victory. With Wildlife, the band offers their most powerful statement to date, melding explosive instrumentals and poignant storytelling in a genuinely exciting way.

!ATTENTION! – Another Year

Long a well-kept Ontario secret that kept their recording budget low by only producing stuff in their crowded Toronto practice space, !ATTENTION! finally seem poised to take on Satanic Surfers and Dillinger Four fans around North America with the release of Another Year. Tracked in a big-time studio and backed by the band’s most aggressive touring cycle to date, these songs, the kind of anthemic pop-punk jams that beg for massive sing-alongs up and down the east coast, are finally getting heard.

Shores – To Volstead
	Self-proclaimed “slowcore” innovators / inventors, Grand Rapids’ Shores can be a tough slog. These aren’t easy songs to dig into, but they reward repeated listens (an admittedly horrendous music journalism cliche that is sometimes true), revealing their subtleties as the band works their way through a cross-section of venerable post-hardcore influences. Really, really slowly.

Transit – Listen and Forgive

Their early releases showed loads of speedy, technical ’90s pop-punk promise, but then Transit shifted towards auto-tuned predictability. Listen and Forgive sees them driving back towards what made them so appealing in the first place, but ditches the double-time smashery of Epitaph and Fat and replaces it with a mature (yet another occasionally true cliche) and nuanced approach to songwriting. The band now seems more aligned with Tigers Jaw than Four Year Strong, and for the future of the genre, that’s probably a good thing.

Senders – Lucidity/Lividity

Sarcastically referred to as “stoner emo” by their label Kiss of Death, Senders kind of are stoner emo. Like Hum meets Weedeater, the band balances a nuanced understanding of atmospheric and catchy post-rock with the heaviness and repetitive riff-age of, you know, people who smoke a lot of pot. Lucidity/Lividity demonstrates this delicate balance in an even stronger fashion than any of the band’s earlier recordings, making it a crucial listen for the person in your life who loves their vaporizer as much as their Failure records.

Surprises, disappointments and albums to watch for next month

Surprise of the month: Patrick Stump continues to prove that, even though he’s kind of goofy, he was clearly the dude with his head on straight in Fall Out Boy. Soul Punk, which isn’t really a punk record at all, shows off a guy whose love of music clearly goes pretty far beyond pop-punk and Michael Jackson (although there’s definitely a lot of the later). It’s inconstant at times, but Stump’s genuine affection for great artists like Herbie Hancock gets filtered through his naturally high-energy songwriting style and comes out sounding, at the very least, impressively original.

Disappointments: After an almost-return-to-form with 2009’s Not Without A Fight, New Found Glory just blew it completely with Radiosurgery, a record so transparently half-baked that it’s kind of insulting.

Out in November: H20’s Don’t Forget Your Roots, Future of the Left’s Polymers are Forever, Coliseum’s Parasites, and more.